The Prairie Deco Blues

Part 1, Behind the Book

Part 1. Conception.

I have been studying the life and work of the obscure 20th Century architectural sculptor Lee Oskar Lawrie, (1877-1963) since 2000. I took my first trip to New York City that year, and I roamed the city photographing and admiring its Art Deco architecture.

On that trip, my wife and I toured the Rockefeller Center, and during that tour, I first learned that Lee Lawrie had created the Atlas, the facade of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, and many additional relief sculptures on that trip.

While I then knew almost nothing about Lawrie, I was aware of the fact that he had created the Sower, a 19-foot tall statue of a farmer sowing seeds, that sits atop the Nebraska State Capitol, back in my home state of Nebraska.

During the same trip, I also learned that Hildreth Meiere had created the giant “rondels” on the south façade of Radio Music Hall.  And I was also aware that she had created the magnificent mosaic floors and Guastavino ceilings in the Nebraska State Capitol.

It was then that I had an epiphany of sorts.  In learning that these two artist, of whom I had barely ever heard of, had worked on Rockefeller Center, it dawned on me that they must have been world class artists elsewhere in the world, despite being nearly anonymous in Nebraska.

It begged the question, how did Nebraska manage to land these two, obviously famous artists, to decorate their Capitol? 

 In 1920, Nebraska was in need of a new capitol, since the existing building was poorly constructed and by then, it was cracking and deteriorating rapidly.

The state created a commission to oversee the construction of a new one, and it held a national competition, seeking submission from five of the top architectural firms nationwide, as well as five Nebraska-based firms.

To make a long story short, the firm of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and Associates on New York, New York won the competition, with a radically different design. It was in a skyscraper, featuring a tower that would stand 400 feet tall.

As for how Nebraska gained Ms. Meiere and Mr. Lawrie, they were already working with Goodhue. They each collaborated with Goodhue on the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, D.C.  In fact, Lawrie had been working with Goodhue since 1895, starting when he was just 18 years old, and Goodhue was just 26.

In my epiphany, this coincidence of the same artists working at Rockefeller Center that had created literally tons of art at the Capitol fascinated me.  Or more precisely, Lawrie’s work became an obsession for me. I began frequenting bookstores, hunting though books on American Art and sculpture, hunting for information on what else Lawrie had done. But in the early 2000s, almost none of the books I found on 20th Century art had any mention of Lawrie.

Recall also, that in 2000, the Internet was still in its infancy, and not even Netscape Navigator provided much information on Lawrie. Consequently, I began turning to libraries, and more specifically, art and architecture libraries.

Over the next decade, I spent many vacations hunting down sites where I had located Lawrie’s sculpture; photographing it and researching at these sites, in either buildings’ archives  and/or libraries.  

In my career, I served roughly 25 years as a paralegal and policy analyst, during which, I obtained a master of arts degree in Legal Studies and Legal Administration. It was in grad school where I learned legal research as well as how to perform primary or field research, which taught me how to find what I needed in libraries as well as archives. Additionally, much of my research included interviews of historians, architects, librarians and archivists at these individual repositories of knowledge.  I grew to love the smell of century-old documents.

In my first decade of research, I visited the New York Sculpture Society’s archives, the Rockefeller Center archives, Columbia University’s libraries, the New York Public Library, the University of Pennsylvania’s architectural archives in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Archives in Harrisburg, The American Institute of Architecture’s Library, the National Academy os Sciences archives in Washington, D.C. Gettysburg, the Library of Congress, and University of Nebraska’s Love Library and Architecture Library.  

From the second decade on of my research, I have visited the Louisiana State Archives, Bok Tower’s Archives, Caltech’s archives, the Los Angeles Public Library’s archives and revisited the Library of Congress, to study Lawrie’s archives.

The product of my research has yielded a website, as well as four separate books.  The first two books were the softbound and hardbound editions of Lee Lawrie’s Prairie Deco: History in Stone at the Nebraska State Capitol.  These two were produced using software from Blurb.com, which allowed an author to create a book, by using their templates to add text and photos. Unfortunately, these books were not cost effective for retail sales.

In the Spring 2011, I was contacted by Tom Schmitz, a librarian from Lincoln, Nebraska who had seen one of these Blurb.com books at the city library.  He was affiliated with the Nebraska Library Commission, and he invited me to come to this statewide organization’s annual gathering the following September to present and sell my book.  As noted, the existing book I had was not commercially viable.

Consequently, I decided to produce the book myself, by hiring my own editor, graphic artist and printer. I spent nearly all of my spare time for the rest of that spring and summer editing the manuscript, editing my photos, working with my editor and designer, selecting the papers for the pages and covers, and finally having the books printed. I had a run of 250 books printed, which was all I could afford to produce.

For the most part, the books received favorable reviews, and I was able to sell it at the Nebraska History Museum, the Nebraska State Capitol, as well as on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online.

After these sold out, I hired a professional book consultant whose team re-edited the text, reshuffled all of the photographs, did some amazing graphics work and created the book as a print-on-demand product, to avoid the huge expense of printing hundreds of books all at once.

I refer to the resulting book simply as the 4th Edition.  I managed to get it published on February 28, 2018; which was the final day of the Nebraska Sesquicentennial, as well as my late mother’s birthday.

In June of 2020, (during the height of the pandemic,) the book garnered a finalist medal from the IndieBookAwards, and in May 2021, the book received a favorable and coveted review from Kirkus Reviews, the pinnacle publication of book reviewers.

Also in May 2021, Amazon and Ingram Publisher Services first published two books, attributed to Jeremiah Ashcroft and Bertha Godnick.  And these books plagiarized my 2011 book in its entirety—but omitting my title page, and cutting the “about the author” page.   They also used every one of my photographs, as well as many other copyrighted photos that I had paid to use under their creators’ licenses. It was plagiarism, plain and simple.

 Part 2 will dive deeper into my experience with copyright infringement.

 #copyright infringement #plagiarism #departmentofJustice